'Let me take a fix on this position,' said Dan Bass. 'Just in case the police ask you exactly where the body was located when you found it.' He went into the wheelhouse and took a compass bearing, and jotted it down in Gilly's notepad.
Gilly said to me, 'What was she like, this woman? God, it must have been awful.'
'It's difficult to say what she looked like. Everybody's hair looks the same colour underwater, especially in water as thick as that. The fish had been at her, too. Fish aren't particularly fastidious. She still had a face, but I don't suppose even her best friend would have recognized it.'
Gilly put her arm around my shoulders, and kissed my forehead. 'You don't have any idea how glad I am that you're safe.'
'The feeling, my love, is mutual.'
She helped me down into the cabin just below the wheelhouse, where there were two narrow bunks, a table, and a tiny galley. She laid me down on one of the bunks, peeled off my wetsuit, and toweled me dry. Then she tucked me into the blankets, kissed me again, and said, 'Get warm. Doctor McCormick's orders.'
'I hear and I obey,' I told her.
A few minutes later, the Alexis came about, and Dan Bass shut down the engine. I felt the boat rock and sway as Edward and Forrest clambered aboard, and I heard their wet flippers on the deck. Once he had stripped off his wetsuit, Edward came down into the cabin, and perched himself on the opposite bunk.
'Jesus,' he said, breathing on his spectacles, and putting them on. He blinked at me with water-reddened eyes. 'I can tell you something, I really thought for a moment there that you were gone and lost forever.'
Forrest peered into the cabin and called, 'How're you feeling?'
'Fine, thanks,' I said. 'I forgot to keep my eyes on you, that was all.'
'Well, I'm sorry, we made the same mistake,' said Forrest. 'It was unforgivable, and I'm real sorry. You know what they say about diving; the smallest error can escalate in seconds into total disaster, and I'm just glad that it didn't happen this time.'
'It was damned close,' I replied.
'Yes — Dan said something about a body. You found a body down there.'
'That's right. A woman in a nightgown. Floating around like a mermaid. I must have set up some kind of a wave when I finned past her, because she came up after me as if she was alive.'
'A woman in a nightgown?’ asked Edward.
'That's right. She was too badly bloated for me to tell what she looked like; but she couldn't have been in the water all that long.'
'Mrs Goult,' said Edward.
'Mrs who?'
'I read about it in the Granitehead Messenger, round about the middle of last week. Mrs James Goult disappeared from her home in Granitehead in the middle of the night, taking none of her clothes, but driving off in one of the family cars to Granitehead Harbour, and taking off in her husband's $200,000 yacht. Neither the yacht nor Mrs Goult has been seen since.'
'You think that was Mrs Goult?' I asked him. That body?'
'It might have been. From what you say, she couldn't have been down there more than a few days; and if she's wearing a nightgown…'
'It sure sounds like her,' put in Forrest.
'There's something else,' said Edward. 'Mrs Goult's husband said in the newspaper report that his wife had been upset for quite a while recently. She'd lost her mother from cancer, and apparently she and her mother were very close.'
'How come you read all of this?' asked Forrest. He sniffed, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
'I used to work for the Goults when I was about fifteen, cleaning Mr Goult's car. They were friends of my folks. My dad and Mr Goult were both in real-estate, although Mr Goult's into waterside condos these days. My dad thinks that waterside condos are immoral, prostituting the character of Salem and Granitehead. That's why they don't see too much of each other anymore.'
'Your dad thinks that waterside condos are immoral?’ asked Gilly.
Edward took off his spectacles, and gave them another polish. He looked at Gilly seriously. 'My dad lives in the past. He can't understand why they stopped building Federal-style houses, with cellars and shutters and wrought-iron railings.'
'Edward,' I said, 'are you hypothesizing what I think you're hypothesizing?'
'Good grief,' put in Forrest, 'I can't even say «hyposethizing» once, let alone twice.'
Edward glanced at Gilly, and then back at me. 'I don't know. Maybe I'm just being tendentious again.'
'I don't understand,' said Gilly.
I nodded towards Edward. 'What I think Edward's thinking is that Mrs Goult may not have drowned in this particular location by accident. She may have sailed here on purpose, and drowned herself here either by accident or design, in order to be close to the wreck of the David Dark.'
That was roughly what was passing through my mind,' Edward agreed.
'But why would she do that?' asked Gilly, perplexed.
'She'd lost her mother, remember. Maybe she'd been haunted by her mother, the same way — ' Edward paused.
'It's all right, Edward,' I told him. 'Gilly knows all about Jane.'
'Well, the same way you've been haunted by your late wife, and the same way Mrs Simons was haunted by her late husband. And maybe, just maybe, she felt like I do that if she could get to the source of the hauntings, the catalyst that's been setting all these apparitions off, she could lay her mother's spirit to rest.'
'You think she'd drown herself to do that?' asked Forrest, with obvious incredulity.
'I don't know,' Edward admitted. 'But the motivation to put dead people to rest is extraordinarily powerful in almost every society in the world. The Chinese burn paper money at funerals, so that the dead will be rich when they get to heaven. In New Guinea, they smear their corpses with mud and ashes to make it easier for the body to return to the soil out of which it originally came. And what do we carve on Christian headstones? "Rest In Peace." It's important, Forrest, for reasons we may not even begin to understand. It's Instinctive. We know that once our loved ones are dead, they're going to be facing an experience totally unlike their life when they were alive, physically and conceptually, and somehow we have this urgent drive to protect them, to see them through it, to make sure that they're safe. Now, why do we feel this way? Logically, it's absurd. But maybe there was once a time when dead people were threatened more openly, when the burial rites were an important and well-understood safeguard against the dangers that dead people were going to have to come up against before they were able to rest forever.'
Forrest grimaced, and rubbed the back of his neck in something that was very close to exasperation, but as an ethnologist he couldn't deny the fundamental truth of what Edward was saying.
Edward went on, 'It's my belief that there's something in the wreck of the David Dark that's been unsettling the usual natural process whereby dead souls are laid naturally to rest. I know you think I'm a fruitcake, but I can't help that. I've been over it again and again, and it's one feasible explanation. I'm not saying it's a rational explanation, but then what's been happening in Granitehead isn't rational anyway. In the case of Mrs Goult, maybe she'd been visited by her dead mother; and maybe she felt that if she could somehow get close to the David Dark, she could release her mother's spirit.'
'Do you think it's likely that she even knew about the David Dark?’ asked Jimmy.
'I don't think so,' said Edward. 'It's more likely that she just felt drawn here by whatever influences this wreck has been giving out.'